ProfessorClare McArthur

Project Opportunities

Title: The foraging and behavioural ecology of mammalian herbivores: how they interact with the plants they eat and with the predators that want to eat them

Summary of opportunity:

Ecological interactions with mammalian herbivores: the ways in which plant, herbivores and predators respond to one another on an individual basis, and the implications for populations and communities. We explore the foraging and behavioural ecology of mammalian herbivores: how they deal with plants and predators, the choices they make when foraging and the implications of those choices on themselves and those (plant and animals) with whom they interact. These questions are fundamentally interesting and can be applied to management and conservation. For example, do competitors or predators (or both) limit rock-wallaby populations? How do invasive deer interact with native wallabies and do they alter plant communities through selective foraging? 

Opportunity synopsis:

Plant defend and predators attack, provoking the never-ending daily dilemma faced by herbivores of how to eat enough without being eaten. This is the basis to my research and those of my students. You have the opportunity to explore components of these interactions with marsupial herbivores as the focus, and the natural woodland/forest environment as the backdrop. In particular, my projects explore how plant chemistry modifies foraging behaviour and food patch use by herbivores, how the abiotic and biotic environment alters this interaction and finally how the presence or fear of predators provides yet another constraint on the foraging choices that herbivores make. All this serves to understand how individuals respond to the world around them, which is ultimately manifest in differences in reproductive success, population- and community-level patterns and, presumably, evolution.

Project Opportunities

Title: Ecologically relevant heuristics and problem-solving by mammals

Summary of opportunity:

Foraging involves decision-making and problem-solving, and this is especially relevant in novel landscapes such as cities exploited by native species or natural landscapes invaded by pest species. This project explores how animals such as brushtail possums, wallabies and rats solve problems and make decisions about which foods to consume. It blends studies of animal behavior and cognition with ecologically relevant scenarios, to understand which food (prey/plant) types are vulnerable to being consumed as a function of how animals think. The project may also explore how individual variation in behavior (i.e. personality) alters the above.

Opportunity synopsis:

Involves research with captive and/or free-ranging animals, with motion-triggered cameras and manipulative experiments. Study sites include Ku-Ring-Gai National Park and university campuses.

Project Opportunities

Title: Influence of plant odours on foraging and behavioural ecology of mammalian herbivores

Summary of opportunity:

Odour ecology is an emerging new field when applied to foraging mammalian herbivores. Using free-ranging swamp wallabies in their natural habitat near Sydney, you will explore how plant odours influence their foraging decisions and/or diet. We know herbivores are attracted to plant odours, and this should increase foraging efficiency. You will therefore test how plant odours affect plant apparency in associational plant refuges; and/or, whether plant species selection is a function of odour signal-to-noise ratio.

Opportunity synopsis:

We predict that if a long-distance cue reduces search time, attractive plant odour treatments at feeding stations will lower Giving-Up-Density (GUD). You will titrate different patch quality characteristics, combining the GUD method with motion-triggered cameras, to determine the relative benefits and costs of plant nutrients vs. the conspicuousness of the odour signal to foraging choices.

AND/OR

We also predict that if plant odour cues affect foraging efficiency by lowering search time, and this in turn affects dietary decisions, then plants with strong detectable signals will be more conspicuous, perceived as more available and so positively selected. You will explore this, quantifying the diet of wallabies using microscopic analysis of cuticle and epidermal features from plants in scats compared to reference samples, to determine relative abundance of consumed plant species. By odour signature analysis of fresh plant samples, and estimates of relative field availability of plant species, you will test plant species selection as a function of odour signal-to-noise ratio.

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Project Opportunities

Title: Wildlife on the edge: how does personality, behaviour and foraging ecology of possums vary across the urban-woodland boundary?

Summary of opportunity:

You will explore the impacts of urbanisation on the foraging and behavioural ecology of our native wildlife, by comparing the personality traits and behavioural responses of individual common brushtail possums across an urban-natural landscape boundary. Your results will be part of a larger project exploring how these factors affect the disease ecology of the species.

Opportunity synopsis:

THE PROJECT: is a fully funded part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, exploring the impacts of urbanisation on the autecology and disease ecology of our native wildlife. You will quantify personality traits of individual common brushtail possums, test whether these traits differ among possum populations and whether they are linked to dietary differences and behavioural responses of individual animals to the world around them. You will compare possums in urban habitat, neighbouring native woodland, and in a fenced wildlife sanctuary where predation risk has been low for nearly a decade. The scats you collect as part of the project will be used by a post-doc on the same ARC project, to test for differences in “reverse zoonoses”, i.e., gut parasites picked up as a form of urban pollution and potentially transmitted from the city to the bush.

Your project will build on our research, including the work of former PhD students: • Mella VSA, Ward AJW, Banks PB, McArthur C (2015) Personality affects the foraging response of a mammalian herbivore to the dual costs of food and fear. Oecologia 177:293-303. doi: 10.1007/s00442-014-3110-8 • Mella VSA et al. (2016) Effective field-based methods to quantify personality in brushtail possums (Trichosurus vulpecula). Wildl. Res. 43:332–340 • Wat KKY, Herath APHM, Rus AI, Banks PB, McArthur C (2019) Space use by animals on the urban fringe: interactive effects of sex and personality. Behav. Ecol. doi: 10.1093/beheco/arz194 • Herath APHM, Wat KKY, Banks PB, McArthur C (accepted JUL 2021) Animal personality drives individual dietary specialisation across multiple dimensions in a mammalian herbivore. Funct. Ecol.